The site, which launched in Sept. 2011, later activated its Web- and iOS-based Music Concierge service, which supplements the Songza experience by helping to tie music to users' lifestyle, be it playing video games or holding a weekday dance party.

Just 10 days after the mobile app reached the iPad in June, Songza celebrated 1.15 million iOS downloads. By the summer, the service was officially available on the Internet, and for iOS and Kindle Fire devices, as well as select Android tech, with a playlist for almost any occasion.

But Songza wasn't always the plan for its four co-founders, who stumbled upon the music service as a happy accident. From indie online music store/social network service Amie Street to international music lifestyle company, Elias Roman as well as co-founders Peter Asbill, Elliott Breece, and Eric Davich had a lot to celebrate in 2012.

Roman recently chatted with PCMag about the evolution of his "lifestyle enhancement company," why he isn't afraid of Pandora, and the monster mascot's true identity.

PCMag: How did Songza come to be?Elias Roman: It started with an accident. In February of 2006, my co-founders and I were sitting around a keg of Honey Brown. We were second-semester seniors in college; not a ton going on. We were having this philosophical discussion around what it would take for us to buy music. Was there any way we were going to stop stealing music, and if so, what would be required for that to happen? We ended up with this laundry list of features. It was feature after feature after feature [that] we felt would be required for us to ever stop pirating music. And by the time we were done with the series of discussions, it looked like we had a real thing there  a thing that we would respond to; a thing that our peers seemed to test well with. So that became our first business together  Amie Street. We were living on Amie Street at the time, so it wasn't super creatively named.

Amazon was our first formal investor, and they actually ended up acquiring AmieStreet.com in 2010, but two years after we started that business, we found this huge shift in consumption. A short 24 months later, we were looking back at college kids and they were downloading music and wiping their hard drive and downloading again, or just starting to stream music, and it was like everything had changed. The concept of ownership didn't matter at all, as long as your music was there when you wanted it.

We looked at that, and we said that the writing is on the wall here. Downloading is absolutely going to give way to streaming. What are we doing in the downloading space? At that point [later in 2008], we started to envision what the perfect streaming service would be. [ ] And we have the formula for what we do now.

PCMag: Growing a business out of a group of college friends, have you found that it has been easy working together, or have there been times when you think 'Maybe I shouldn't have gone into business with my friends?'ER: We had a very, very easy transition. It started being friends. We were all in the same hall freshman year. We actually had a mini-business before we graduated; basically we were really terrible landscapers. So it almost seemed natural that we would start working together. And then after we graduated, we all moved into a house. At that point there were five of us. We spent almost the first year five dudes in a house. You'd be brushing your teeth, and talking about marketing. Three years ago, we all sort of started to live in real places, and then got, in 2007, an office for the first time. So, no, I never once had any reason to regret it. These are people you trust implicitly; you know really, really well. At this point everyone knows what they do well, what everyone else does well. It's just sort of a well-oiled machine. I think we've been very lucky. There are obviously a lot of horror stories out there. But not for us.

PCMag: How do you hope people use Songza and what do you hope they get from the experience?ER: One of the first things that we realized: Music isn't a product for people. It's not something you have time carved out in your day for. So when people are listening to music, typically they're listening to it for a purpose  to change a mood or enhance a mood or facilitate an activity; to help them relax, to help them wake up, to help them entertain their friends, to help them drown out their co-worker while they're trying to focus at the office. One of the things that we realized [was that] people are working too hard. They're doing mental math to figure out what artists make sense for throwing a BBQ, or what playlist would make them sound cool when their friends came over. What we want people to experience when they use Songza is, we're making whatever it is they're doing better, effortlessly. Because ultimately we see ourselves not as a music company at all, but as a lifestyle enhancement company. If you turn on Songza while you're commuting, what I want is that your commute it going to be better. And if you turn on Songza when you go to the gym, I want your workout to be better. That's our product.

Which I think is in stark contrast to every other service in our space, whether it's Pandora or Spotify, those are music companies. Their product is helping you search for and browse and organize and catalog music. That's what they do, because music is their product. We just see ourselves as something different.

Getting People Hooked on Songza

PCMag: Do you actually find that there is any competition between Songza and services like those, or because they are so different, you can exist on your own level?ER: Ultimately there is a limited number of listening hours in a day. That's where you have the most overlap  you can only be listening to so many things, and you're only going to listen to one thing at a time. But I think in terms of value that we offer and the experience of using the product, they're very, very different.

PCMag: Have you been watching the music industry change online? Is there anything you're expecting to change in the next few years that you will have to adapt to?ER: With Songza, we fall under a statutory license, so in many ways, we're very much insulated a little bit more from the industry. The trends that we're looking at every day are more about mobile consumption. How are people interacting with their phones? How are people interacting with their tablets? How are tablets different than phones? What kind of activities are people doing with their devices? How do people transition from one type of device to another throughout the day? So those are really the trends that we're obsessed with. Much more so than music industry trends in general. We have 25 experts  freelancers  who are tastemakers in music. So more often than not, it's not looking at trends but it's saying, based on their expertise, what are the soundtracks, the vibes, that are going to make working in Excel better? And it turns out that epic film scores makes working in Excel better. Because The Last of the Mohicans soundtrack comes on, and all of a sudden you feel three-and-a-half times more significant than you did five seconds ago.

PCMag: Tell me a little bit more about how those 25 experts work.ER: There's a two-way flow. Sometimes we'll reach out to them and say, "We just got a great request from our users," or say, "We just thought of a gap in our library that we'd love you to fill. We're reaching out to you because it's in your sub-genre of expertise. We need soothing, breathy male singer-songwriters for a birthing playlist. Go do it." And we'll have them create something awesome like that. Or, they'll reach out, and they'll say, "You know what you're missing? You're missing the sounds of vintage New Orleans. We're going to create that playlist and you guys figure out where it fits in, when, and for who."

PCMag: Are you ever thinking of turning Songza into a paid platform, or are you hoping to keep it as a free service?ER: There's a lot of interesting revenue streams that are available to us that are maybe a little less available to other music services, because they're music services  they're monetizing like music services do. As a lifestyle service  a service that makes it easier for you to work out and commute and entertain and sleep  I think there are some really interesting and big revenue options that we have that don't involve putting up a subscription wall. We're committed to developing those before we ask our users to pay for access. And, of course, before we would ever consider implementing audio ads.

PCMag: Where does Songza's music come from?ER: For a service like ours, we acquire music similar to a way that [New York radio station] Z100 might acquire music. So, basically, any way we might get our hands on a song, as long as it's legal and as long as it's been commercially released by the copyright owner, means we can stream it. We can rip a CD, we can download it from Amazon, we can have it sent by a label, we can have an artist ship it to us. There's really a lot of ways we can get our hands on content. We also have a content provisioning partner who supplies us with a lot of it. So, that's actually not necessarily the hard part for us.

PCMag: What is the hard part for you?ER: The hard part for us is that we operate in an incredibly crowded ecosystem, and so once people try Songza, they love it; our engagement retention's really high once we make people's radar, but getting them to try it for the first time, that's where we have to be really different and creative and weird. One of the things that we've done is try to answer the question "How can we make a brand seem really, really interesting and relevant and create something cool on the Songza platform, such that that becomes almost a co-marketing event with an interesting brand?" At Fashion Week, we partnered with Mercedes Benz. And in return, they sent a lot of users to the playlists, they shared them on Facebook, they asked people what songs they would add to the mixes. We've done that with Mercedes Benz, Victoria's Secret, Zappos, and Thrillist, and Radio Shack, and McCormack, and a handful of others.

Another way: We've always done what we call benefit media. The theory there is [that] good business not only can mean doing good, but maybe has to mean doing good, too. What we always look for with the small marketing budgets we do have is how can we give this to a charity we care about, instead of to a search engine marketing platform? And the way that typically takes shape is, we'll do a donation-per-listener with a non-profit. Right now, we're doing something with Pencils for Promise and Free the Children, and basically we create these fun playlists that are branded, sort of DJed by the charity, they share it with their donors, and they ask, instead of taking out your wallet, listen to it and share it. For everyone you share it with, Songza's going to make a donation to us.

PCMag: How many users do you have currently?ER: The last numbers we reported were 2 million in the U.S. and 1 million in Canada. At this point, both of those numbers are pretty outdated. We've grown nicely from there. We have millions of active users.

PCMag: What is the most popular Songza platform among users?ER: It's been an interesting sort of see-saw. Before we had mobile apps, we had been iterating for a while on the Web. We had this user base of a decent number of testers for us. When we released mobile apps, they started at zero, then a lot of our users started using them, and very, very quickly, mobile became the No. 1 platform. Today, about 75 percent of the people who use Songza will use it via an app  a tablet or mobile phone app. Web, even though it's only 25 percent, has continued to grow really, really strongly. People use Songza on different platforms throughout the day. Really often, when we acquire a new Web user, we've effectively acquired a new mobile user, too, and vice versa.

PCMag: What sort of feedback do you receive from users?ER: What's really nice is people express their experiences with Songza in terms of their lifestyle. We definitely get the "I just discovered an incredible new artist, song, or genre." But more often than that, we're hearing about some element of their day that is different and/or better because of Songza. And it's all about your day. The fact that you've woken up better because of Songza; we've made it easier for you to get out of bed  that's the most important thing that you take away from the experience. That's the feedback we get. Or if there's a thing that you didn't do before, but you do now, that's what we hear about. Like, we hear from people who say, "A part of the morning routine for my kids, they would watch TV while everyone got dressed and ate breakfast. Now we listen to these fun, quirky, family-friendly playlists of songs, and we talk about them. Our routine is totally different now, but I think it's a lot better."

PCMag: Your team was recently recognized among Forbes' 30 Under 30 in the music category [among artists Wiz Khalifa, Adele, Justin Bieber, Marcus Mumford, Frank Ocean, One Direction, and Taylor Swift]. What was your reaction to earning a spot on that list?ER: It was really exciting. Digital music, as a space, is not that old. And we, in one way or another, have been involved in it for a long time. February of 2013 will be our seventh anniversary of making the insane move of being digital music entrepreneurs. It was really exciting; it was really, really rewarding. And any time you're on a list with Ke$ha it's a good day. [Laughs] We definitely have high-fives, there's pretty frequent sweaty hugs, and then it's back to work. We're a pretty serious team. We're really fortunate this year.

PCMag: What kind of technology do you carry with you?ER: iOS and Android are the platforms represented here. We actually all started as BlackBerry folks, and were very, very reluctant, especially for writing emails, to get rid of it. But it's just iOS and Android in here.

Streaming Music Service Reviews

About Stephanie Mlot

Stephanie joined PCMag in May 2012, moving to New York City from Frederick, Md., where she worked for four years as a multimedia reporter at the second-largest daily newspaper in Maryland. She has also written about technology, science, culture, and Doctor Who for PCMag sister site Geek.com. She is based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

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